Dear Juliet:

Here’s the pitch. You will know by now that 5000 people a year, often young American teenage girls, send letters seeking advice or support about love, lust and broken hearts to your good, dead, fictitious self. They feel your Shakespearean pain and think you can feel theirs, on account of the whole suicide gone wrong thing with Romeo.

The Plot

So we set this film in Verona, send in eye candy and journalist Amanda Seyfried, the bubbly, beautiful blonde from Mama Mia!, where she played a girl called Sophie and call her Sophie in this one as well with the view of making an unsubtle connection between the roaring box office success of that film and this one. She is on a romantic break with her foodie fiancé Victor (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) and as he goes off to eat his way through the city, she decides on a less calorific tour and finds your supposed grave, which is festooned with notes and letters from the loveless and love sick aforementioned teenage girls.

Because we want to create a slightly surreal fairytale feel for Verona, as Amélie did for Paris, we throw in an Amélie touch as Sophie finds an old letter stuck in a crevasse in this Italian Wailing Wall, much as Amélie discovered a little box of little boy memorabilia in a crack in her bathroom wall. Keen, as Amélie was to track down the now grown up boy, Sophie goes on a mission to find the writer of the letter, now a 70-ish year old Englishwoman called Claire, played by Vanessa Redgrave. The letter was to the love of her younger life, Lorenzo, whom she had to leave. Sophie aims to get Claire and Lorenzo together, because true love never dies and absence (if you forget to factor in that people don’t always age as well as the fine wines and cheeses Victor seeks out) makes the lovesick heart grow even fonder.

Claire comes to Verona with her snotty grandson Charlie, played to good comic effect by Christopher Egan, who doesn’t go in for all this romantic tosh. Cue sparks flying between Sophie and Charlie, a less foppish Hugh Grant (well, that’s not too difficult) and love, of a sort, blossoms for the young couple, as her fiancé feasts himself into oblivion.

Now let’s throw in an art imitating life imitating art factor and have Vanessa Redgrave’s love interest played by her real life husband Franco Nero, because they, too, reunited after a very long real life separation.

The Thoughts

Sounds like brilliant, box office busting, frothy rom com chick flick heaven? Well, it is and it isn’t. The tangled web they attempt to weave unravels rather quickly and I can’t help thinking the fault, dear readers, lies not in the stars, but in the clunky, somewhat predictable script (Shakespeare it isn’t) they have to deliver. Pretty much everything that happens in this film can be seen a mile away, particularly by the seasoned rom com film goer. But what the characters lack in credibility (both love interests of the fair Sophie are just not interesting enough to love), the film makes up for in it’s lovingly shot backdrop of scenic Verona. The real chemistry is between Redgrave and Seyfried, so the viewer (let’s face it, it will largely be one for the ladies) can say, “Hurrah women, ya boo sucks, men.”

I can see this lining the DVD supermarket bins in six months time and if it generates any movie memorabilia, it will be posters of the still lovely Vanessa Redgrave, the highest brow in this low brow, but engaging enough, love story lite.

The Film Buzz Rating: ******~~~~ (6/10)

UK Release Date: 9th June 2010

Director: Gary Winick

Writer’s: Jose Riveria, Tim Sullivan

Links: IMDB, Official Site